DAMASCUS, Jan 1, (Agencies): An Arab League advisory body called on Sunday for the immediate withdrawal of the bloc’s observers from Syria saying their presence was having no impact on the government’s deadly crackdown on protests.
The call came as the League prepared to send yet more monitors to Syria, after pro-democracy protesters saw the New Year in with demonstrations and a child reportedly became the first fatality of 2012.
The speaker of the Arab Parliament, Salem al-Diqbassi, urged Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi to “immediately pull out the Arab observers, considering the continued killing of innocent civilians by the Syrian regime.”
The Arab Parliament is an 88-member advisory committee made up of lawmakers from each of the League’s 22 member nations.
Damascus’s actions are “a clear violation of the Arab League protocol which is to protect the Syrian people,” Diqbassi said in a statement.
“We are seeing an increase in violence, more people are being killed including children ... and all this in the presence of Arab League monitors, which has angered the Arab people,” he said.
Diqbassi’s comments came as the League prepares to send a new team to Syria on Thursday.
“Around 20 more observers will head to Damascus from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Tunisia,” said Adnan al-Khodeir, the League’s Syria operations chief.
Fifty observers arrived on Monday as part of an Arab deal endorsed by Syria, which calls for the withdrawal of the military from towns and residential districts, a halt to violence against civilians and the release of detainees.
The monitors are on a month-long mission that kicked off Dec 26.
Arab League monitors toured several protest hot sports on Sunday, official media said, as a dispute emerged after one observer reportedly accused authorities of posting snipers on rooftops and demanded they be removed.
On Sunday, a seven-year-old boy was killed when his father’s car came under a hail of bullets, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
“The first victim of 2012,” the Britain-based watchdog said in a statement received by AFP in Nicosia.
Three other civilians were killed by security force gunfire on Saturday, two of them by snipers in the flashpoint central province of Homs, it added.
The bodies of two civilians were also found in a village near Homs city.
Activists have accused the regime of posting snipers on rooftops, and that issue appears to have triggered a dispute among the observers.
In a video released by the Observatory, a man wearing an orange vest with the Arab League logo said in Daraa: “There are snipers; we have seen them with our own eyes.
“We ask the authorities to remove them immediately; if they don’t remove them within 24 hours, there will be other measures,” the unnamed speaker in the video, which was dated Friday, told a crowd of people.
But veteran Sudanese military intelligence officer General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, who heads the observer mission, said the official seen in the video was making a hypothetical remark.
“This man said that if he saw — by his own eyes — those snipers he will report immediately,” Dabi told the BBC’s Newshour programme. “But he didn’t see” any.
Meanwhile, Syria’s two largest opposition groups signed an agreement on setting up a democracy if President Bashar Assad’s autocratic regime falls, opposition figures said Saturday.
The move is so far the most serious by the fractured opposition to unite against the regime and shows that Assad’s opponents will accept nothing less than his departure from power.
Burhan Ghalioun, leader of the Syrian National Council, and Haytham Manna of the National Coordination Body for Democratic Change in Syria, or NCB, signed the draft in Cairo on Friday night, according to an NCB statement and Omar Idilbi of the SNC.
Syria’s uprising began in March, inspired by other Arab Spring revolts. The United Nations says more than 5,000 people have died as the government has sought to crush the revolt.
Elsewhere, the Swiss supreme court has rejected a demand by a cousin of Syrian President Bashar Assad to visit his lawyer in Switzerland.
Hafez Makhlouf had petitioned Switzerland’s Federal Tribunal to grant him a visa so he could discuss with his lawyer how to overturn international sanctions imposed against him.
The verdict published Thursday was reported Sunday by Switzerland’s NZZ am Sonntag newspaper.
The 40-year-old army colonel heads the Damascus branch of Syria’s General Intelligence Directorate.

Bahrain
Bahraini police fired tear gas grenades to disperse protesters, killing a Shiite protester in the Sunni-ruled country where tensions have been running high, the opposition said on Sunday.
Meanwhile the newly-appointed police chief said 500 officers would be recruited across the country, including Shiites, to help bolster community relations as the country tries to “learn lessons” from past unrest.
Sayyed Hashem Saeed, 15, “was hit in the head,” and a man who rushed to help him during Saturday’s clash was struck in the thigh, said the Al-Wefaq Shiite opposition movement in a statement received by AFP.
The teenager was rushed to a clinic in Sitra south of Manama and then transferred to a hospital in the capital where he died despite efforts to keep him alive, it added.
Authorities said they were investigating the death of the teenager.
A former lawmaker from the opposition group had said earlier that Bahraini riot police broke up a demonstration by Shiites who had responded to a call to protest outside their homes on Saturday.
Matar Matar said the opposition Feb 14 movement “got broad participation in their initiative when they asked Bahrainis to stand in front of their houses.”
Authorities had accused protesters of ambushing a police patrol on Friday near Sitra village and of throwing Molotov cocktails at police and said several suspects were arrested after a police vehicle was damaged.
Shiite-led mass demonstrations which rocked Bahrain earlier this year were violently crushed by government forces using live ammunition and heavy-handed tactics.
A special commission appointed to probe last year’s crackdown on anti-government protests published a report in November denouncing the “excessive and unjustified use of force” by the authorities.
Bahraini police fired tear gas and sound grenades after hundreds of Shi’ite youths demonstrated on Sunday against the death of a 15-year-old protester a day earlier in the Sunni-ruled Gulf island kingdom, residents and activists said.
Confrontations between security forces and protesters take place almost daily in areas populated by members of the Shi’ite Muslim majority, which led anti-government protests Bahrain crushed last year.
“After the funeral, many of the mourners started protesting and the police began using tear gas and sound bombs. It is still going on hours later,” a resident told Reuters from the mostly Shiite Muslim village of Sitra, south of the capital Manama.
At least one demonstrator was injured after being hit in the head by a tear gas canister, activists said in Twitter messages.
The opposition said earlier that Sayed Hashim Saeed, who died on Saturday, had been hit by a tear gas canister at close range.